MailChimp Abuse Desk

MailChimp has been around since 2001. With millions of users sending campaigns to hundreds of millions of recipients, we’re bound to get abuse reports every now and then. We take abuse reports seriously, and we go to great lengths to prevent abuse within our system.

How MailChimp prevents and combats abuse

We have a team of human reviewers, who approve new MailChimp accounts and detect abuse within our system. Our staff uses a variety of criteria to evaluate accounts, ranging from the obvious WHOIS and IP information, to some not–so–obvious behavioral patterns.

We require all users to agree to our Terms of Use before setting up a MailChimp account, and again before importing any existing customer lists into their accounts.

Our abuse-prevention initiative, Omnivore, keeps our system clean by predicting bad behavior in campaigns before they even get out the door.

We offer customizable signup forms for customers who are starting from scratch with MailChimp and don't have a list of customers to import. These signup forms only use the double opt–in method, which keeps prank signups out and stores opt–in proof for every subscriber (like IP address and date/time stamps).

We automatically insert a one–click unsubscribe link in every campaign sent from our system.

All lists managed in MailChimp are automatically cleaned of soft bounces on the fifth campaign attempt, and hard or undeliverable bounces are cleaned instantly.

How we educate customers

Our guides help users learn their way around MailChimp and email marketing in general.

Throughout MailChimp’s user interface (when sending campaigns, setting up lists, and designing templates), we provide customers with links and background information to help them understand email etiquette and spam laws.

How we deal with issues

We embed every email campaign sent from our servers with a Campaign ID, so recipients can easily report abuse to MailChimp. When we receive complaints through our abuse form, we investigate immediately. If the campaign or user account appears suspicious in any way, we’ll suspend the account during the investigation.

We’re registered with major ISPs and anti-spam authorities to receive automated feedback loop alerts when any of our users’ recipients report abuse. When we’re able to parse those alerts, we remove the recipient from the user’s list. If the reports exceed a certain threshold, we send a warning to the user. If the warnings exceed a reasonable threshold, we suspend the user’s account and investigate. Most ESPs and ISPs say a reasonable threshold for abuse complaints is 0.1 percent, which means 1 out of every 1,000 people reported your campaign as junk. Because of the sheer volume of emails sent from our IPs, and because most of our IPs are shared across multiple users, our threshold is stricter than that.

Report email abuse

If you'd like to report an abusive campaign, please use the form below, including full headers. The full header information can be found using instructions in this article. Since every email application is different, you might have to refer to your help files. Usually, if you do a search for "full email headers" or "full message headers," you’ll find the instructions you need.

MailChimp's Abuse Desk will take quick and appropriate action. If you'd like a response from us, please include your email address so we can get back to you. Including your email address is optional, but is extremely useful in helping us investigate an abusive sender.